What are Featured Snippets?

Over the years, Google has been adding more and more information to the search results, aside from the Adwords and organic search results, in order to enhance the search experience.

The Featured Snippets are a format which is supposed to provide users with a concise, direct answer to their questions – right there on the search results page, without the users having to click through to a specific result.

In this article we want to give you an overview of what the topic of “Featured Snippets” entails.

What Exactly is a Featured Snippet?

If we take a look at the search results for the query “what is today?”, we will get it telling us one definite answer which Google believes to fit our question.

This text is taken directly and automatically from the webpage that is linked to in the snippet.

The exciting part is that this snippet actually shows up right above the organic search results and below the AdWords block (which is missing in our example). Compared to Universal Search integrations, the Featured Snippets will not push an organic result off the first page. This is the reason we talk about Featured Snippets being shown at position 0.

Which different kinds of Featured Snippets are there?

Out in the wild, we were able to find a number of Snippets, which we can sort into three categories.

Text Snippets

In our example snippet up top we have a snippet with just text. Aside from those, you can also find Text Snippets with pictures:

Looking at the data, it becomes apparent that a large percentage of texts snippets are taken from Wikipedia articles.

Video Snippets

Aside from text snippets, Google may also decide that a video is the best answer to your quetsion. If this is the case, you will be shown a video snippet. If you click on the preview picture, you will be taken to the linked domain.

Read more: https://www.sistrix.com/ask-sistrix/what-are-featured-snippets/